There are many other and better books on the Holocaust. Goldhagen's premise is that the Germans as a race are antisemitic and that they and they alone were responsible for the deaths of nearly six million Jews. Even a superficial view of the attitudes within Europe at this time shows that antisemitism was rife at this period within many of the European nations. All the countries occupied by the Germans were complicit with the Holocaust to one extent or another. From the Hungarians who paid the Germans to take their Jews to the inhabitants of the Channel Islands who gave up the few Jews on the islands without a word of protest the one notable exception being Denmark where the vast majority of Jews were aided in escaping to Sweden and their belongings returned to them after the end of the war.
I found Goldhagen's views blinkered and downright racist. I will avoid his other works.

This book makes a powerful argument. It's main thesis is that the vast majority of Germans during and before WWII had antisemetic beliefs that were of such power and scope, that they led many ordinary Germans to perpetrate and support the destruction of the Jewish people.

He refutes competing claims such as that the Nazis forced them into killing. He provides many detailed accounts of police squads killing without orders, and sometimes against orders. He demonstrates that men in Police batallion 101 had opportunities to be transferred to non-killing assignments but chose not to. Even as the Germans were near defeat, many male and even female guards at prison camps continued to kill Jews to the very last moment. Himmler had actually commanded them not to do this so he could better negotiate with the Americans. They disobeyed the orders.

Goldhagen's findings are unsettling. It is frighting to believe that a lie can be so powerful as to delude an entire culture. Even the Christian church was largely deceived. However, is this really so hard to accept when we study the history of man? This book contradicts the Disney philosophy that "there is good in everyone, you just have to look deep inside to find it."

Hitler's Willing Executioners is not an easy read. It was Goldhagen's doctoral thesis and it reads like it. There is some repetition and terms used can sometimes be obscure. This is not a popular history. However, there were many times when I could not put it down. The argument breaks new ground and deserves the thorough treatment given to it.

This should, for many reasons, get only one star. It gets two for the occasional flashes of actual, legitimate historical scholarship and for some of the evidence he has dug up.

Nonetheless, it is a truly terrible work, made even more so by its persuasive and populist tone, and the large numbers of copies sold. It is an almost textbook example of the dangers of creating a thesis, and then selecting and interpreting evidence to fit that thesis. His conclusions are simply wrong, and not backed up by evidence. My Master’s Thesis was on the Shoah and I have studied it at postgraduate level for some time and can confirm that this book is dismissed outright by all serious scholars of the period. I can do no more than urge everyone not to waste their time reading it.

A much better work on this topic is Browning’s. Read that instead.

A much more thorough critique can be read here https://www.foreignaffairs.com/review...

or this

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa...

amongst countless others. There is a substantial amount of academic criticism out there on this text, and any decision to read it should be taken with that in mind.

As has been said by others (smarter than me), Goldhagen has ruined a perfectly good piece of research with the need to put forth a particular thesis. In this case, the facts speak for themselves. The body of Holocaust literature and research is sufficiently rich and broad that HWE can be avoided.

You cant fault the research of this book...the end section presents copious amounts of notes, controversial premise though this book may have what I ultimately took from it was the danger of nationalism.
How national pride can easily too to scapegoating and provide the seeds whereby a political order can rise and exploit bigotry.
The book looks how the Holocaust gained momentum and asks where where the dissenting voices?..and of those voices how many where truly strong?...is it fair and acceptable to go with the 'I was only obeying orders argument?'
Ultimately the book makes a good case of antisemitic fervour existing prior to the rise of the Nazis and the Nazis feeding on this and furthering it with work camps and death marches and the likes.
It points out how people did speak up of other aspects of Nazi policy but in the Jewish question?...well the voices weren't so loud....even the church comes out of this quite badly.
I think ultimately it's a book that we can be uncomfortable with but one which I think mirrors the current rise of nationalism in various countries and could act as a warning from history...

This book is the subject of intense criticism, most of which is deserved. The primary issue in my mind is the contradiction between Goldhagen's competing assertions that eliminationism anti-Semtism was near universal in Germany but that the German state refused to allow measures to be taken against Jews in the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods. I find it hard to believe that the character of German anti-semitism was so virulent but that it saw such little expression until 1933, particularly compared to other European states. Goldhagen also fails to persuasively rebut the idea that social-psychological pressures and deference to authority influenced the actions of Police Battalion 101. While the direct command structure of PB101 may have been relatively lax Goldhagen fails to consider the overarching totalitarian framework of the Nazi state. Indeed he neglects almost entirely the institutional and socio-political factors that led to the Holocaust, including, as many have observed, the brutalising effects of the First World War on European society. Goldhagen also avoids discussing, except in passing, the Social Democratic Party which for 30 years from the 1890s-1920s was the most successful party in Germany's quasi-democratic system. One can only suspect the party and the German left wing was overlooked because an examination of their attitudes towards Jews would tend to weaken Goldhagen's thesis.

However, I think critics who contend this book is entirely without merit are wrong. I think the most valuable sections of the book are those exploring the 'work' camps and the death marches. At least one of the reviews on this site asserts that the killers of Jews had 'no choice or they would have killed', which leads one to question whether this reviewer has even read the book, or any other work about the Holocaust. Goldhagen highlights the truth that many ordinary German men and women went above and beyond orders or expectations and showed an exceptional degree of voluntary cruelty. This is an important observation, albeit I am not entirely convinced it is one that has a monocausal explanation (no doubt anti-Semtism is the crucial factor, which no one has ever doubted). However, it sufficiently weakens the explanatory power of theories which highlights Germans supposed ingrained obedience to authority or notions of the 'banality of evil'.

One of the most puzzling claims in the book is the assertion that eliminationist anti-Semitism almost entirely disappeared in Germany after 1945 because of 're-education.' Goldhagen is one of the few, if not only, writers in this field who credits the half-hearted allied reeducation efforts after 1945 as successful in any measure. The lax treatment of Nazi war criminals in the Federal Republic indicates to me the fact that German society took many decades to truly come to terms with the enormity of the Nazi period, unlike the rapid process Goldhagen describes. If I am right (which I may not be) this once again emphasizes the importance of institutional and structural factors in dictating the actions of a country's citizens.

It's been nearly ten years since I read this book but I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about Holocaust history. It was controversial at the time of publication but the author argues, convincingly in my opinion, that ordinary Germans were willing participants in the persecution and murder of Jews, based on the premise that European culture was imbued with anti-semitic sentiment for hundreds of years before Hitler came along .Learning the details of just how bad the Nazi years were for European Jews rips away the abstraction of the number Six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. The details are grim but it is worth reading.

It's absolutely fascinating to think that normal people willingly went along with the final solution. This book examines that phenomenon in a way I've never seen before.

If you scroll through the reviews of this book, you'll see it's controversial. Lots of one and two star offerings by people who find it wholly unconvincing. I'm no scholar of the period, but I found it to be pretty gripping reading considering it started as a doctoral dissertation.

In short, Goldhagen's argument is that the Holocaust was the result of the combined efforts of many hundreds of thousands of people, and popular culture that tries to put the blame on just Hitler or a cadre of SS troops or other committed Nazis is not reckoning honestly with the role of the German people. He believes the antisemitism of the German populace during the time of the war to be so pervasive and extreme that by and large there was consent for eliminationist policies from a significant portion of the people, not only member of the Nazi party. Most regular Germans, he suggests, didn't have many objections.

It's a provocative starting point, and you get see where it gets people up in arms. Yet, as he goes through his analysis, and makes the reader think about the type of organization and commitment it would take to carry out the killing of six million individuals, his view becomes more and more compelling. The book opens with a history of antisemitism in Germany dating back to the days of Martin Luther, which helps set the table for understanding the depth and commonplace acceptance of antisemitism in the society. Then he examines the role of several non-soldier groups in carrying out the Holocaust, and finds over and over that the participants were "willing executioners" and even enthusiastic about their role in terminating the "menace" of Jewry.

It is grim reading, no doubt. Some of the descriptions of killings and occasional accompanying photos are horrifying beyond description. Not every word of the book is convincing: critics have a point that some of it is speculative or that it discounts other pressures that may have acted on participants in the Holocaust. But the weight of the thesis was hard for me to deny by the time I reached the book's end.

As with so many works, it could be shortened significantly without damaging its argument. It's repetition is something of an academic staple, it seems.

But even with its faults, it has challenged the way I think about a world-historical event I thought I knew everything I needed to know about. It's a book that demands accountability, and one that implicitly asks us hard questions about how comfortable we are with the sins of our own society, which I think is one reason people have reacted so viscerally to it.

I don't feel qualified to review this book about the horrors of the Holocaust.....not because I haven't read much about that unbelievable event but because the author puts forward a very controversial approach to the "why" of the slaughter of the Jews that is at odds with most history. The book has stirred violent debates among historians and readers alike and who is to say whether Mr. Goldhagen is correct. His research is impeccable and the arguments that he puts forth are convincing.

What he purports is that the German population as a whole was a willing participant in the Holocaust.....not just the military but the volk whose anti-Semitism was ingrained in their culture. Jews were seen as the enemy and their extermination was seen as just. Long before the Nazis came to power the Jews were degraded, treated cruelly and often murdered. It appeared to make sense to the Germans that Hitler's Final Solution of genocide was acceptable and some actually saw it as a sport. Even near the end of the war when Himmler ordered the people to cease the killings, they continued.

This is a dense and very disturbing book and I am basing my rating on the fact that, besides being well written, the information presented gives the reader much to consider when thinking and studying about the Holocaust, Whether I agree or disagree with the author's conclusions is unimportant.

Terrible, terrible, terrible.

Provocative theory, but one which falls apart throughout his making the argument.

Quite a radical departure from the "I was only obeying orders" school of thought. Goldhagen's thesis is that no one was coerced, they had the possibility to refuse to take part, yet few did...